As a senior in high school, Divya Jakatdar imagined celebrating college acceptances with her friends, attending prom, and walking across the stage at graduation while her family cheered her on.
Instead, the spring of her senior year coincided with the coronavirus pandemic. She said goodbye to her high school classmates via Zoom. Her graduation ceremony was drive-thru.
Jakatdar, 21, thought his senior year at the University of Southern California might be something of an aberration. But recent weeks have been met with unrest after the school canceled commencement speeches by valedictorian Asna Tabassum, director Jon M. Chu and tennis star Billie Jean King, citing safety concerns related to the Israel-Hamas war. On Thursday, the university's 'main stage' graduation ceremony was canceled entirely.
USC's student body president, Ms. “It was a very big blow to the morale of the class, which made her feel like she was losing her high school graduation,” Jakatdar said minutes later when she heard her graduation ceremony was canceled. She said, “We have missed enough.”
But just like during the coronavirus crisis, Mr. Zakadar said, “It seems a bit ridiculous to complain about graduation when people’s lives are at stake.”
This is a story that is happening all over the country. For millions of high school students, their senior years were upended by COVID-19 in 2020, leaving them to celebrate important moments in isolation. Four years later, many of those same students broke the senior year tradition once again. This time it was a response to the Israel-Hamas war and the university's attempts to close or suppress widespread protests.
At Columbia University in New York City, the university's president called in police to clear an encampment of pro-Palestinian protesters, arresting more than 100 protesters. Classes were held online for the remainder of the spring semester. At USC, students protested for several days, demanding that the administration reinstate Mr. Tabassum as speaker. The wave of student activism extends to pro-Palestinian protests at schools including Yale University, the University of Michigan, the University of Texas at Austin, and MIT.
Class of 2024 graduates say they are once again juggling personal milestones transformed by anxiety and frustration about the state of the world beyond college. Many of them say they are taking their discomfort into account, but the fact remains. The pandemic graduating class seems destined to never know a typical graduating class.
“Many of our milestones have brought us big, looming global atrocities,” said Sophia Pargas, a senior at Emerson College in Boston. “I think we’re pretty much conditioned at this point,” she said.
Mr. Fargas, 21, has been covering campus protests and arrests of fellow students in recent months for the school newspaper, The Berkeley Beacon. Still, she's trying to find her moments to celebrate, she said. She plans to attend the makeup party her class is hosting for the first time seniors who were unable to attend.
Maideh Orangi, 22, a senior at USC and executive director of the Middle East and North Africa Student Association, has spent much of her time organizing protests and rallies for Palestinians killed in the Gaza Strip following the Israeli invasion.
“I expected this to be a more typical senior year thing,” Orangi said. “But I’m not upset that this was a defining aspect of my senior year.”
Mr Orangi said he and other students were shocked when university-wide graduation ceremonies were cancelled. “The one glimmer of hope, the one bright side that I was looking forward to in all of this was that one beginning, and now it's all gone,” she said. “I think the end of my senior year left me with a really bittersweet feeling.”
For Rachel Burns, a senior at Barnard College, graduating properly has been a long time coming. When she graduated from high school in Portland, Maine, four years ago, she did so in her car in the school parking lot. Her only plan this time is to ensure that her own and her fellow protesters' demands are met by the university.
“The most important thing now is that we come together and stand united against the government. If it means sacrificing graduation, I’m willing to do it,” Burns, 24, said after getting dressed. She has a capiye around her head and black sunglasses in front of Butler Library.
Not all students feel that way. Ruby Cayen, 23, a senior at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt in Arcata, California, said she was heartbroken by the prospect that protests could prevent her from graduating. “I put blood, sweat, and tears into earning this degree. “My father’s side of the family is Cuban immigrants who fought hard to get into this country and provide an educated life for future generations.”
Mr. Kayen, who identifies as Jewish and a Zionist, said he felt personally harassed by individuals from the Humboldt for Palestine group. “They found me. They called me a supporter of genocide, a baby killer and a fascist,” Mr. Cayenne said. “They don’t know me, they don’t know what I stand for. So it’s a terrible feeling to know that those people are going to potentially take away my hard-earned opportunity to experience graduation.”
Feelings are also widespread among other affected students.
Neve Levy, 24, entered Columbia University in 2020 after a gap of several years and was shocked to learn that classes would be taught remotely due to the pandemic. Now that she's a senior, she's having a hard time understanding her protesters and not protesting against her, she said, but she's aware of how polarizing her topic has become.
“I have a lot of respect for what the protesters and students are doing,” Mr. Levy said at Butler Library. “I struggle to see how it affects many of my Jewish friends.”
Ms. Levy's grandparents live in Israel and were thrilled to see their granddaughter graduate, but that may not happen now.
“At first there were doubts about whether they would succeed because airlines canceled after Iran bombed Israel,” she said. “The fact that I'm actually graduating here, that I've even made it this far is crazy to me. And it's not for me to stop that.”
Sofia Ongele, 24, also wasn't part of the pandemic high school class of 2020, but her senior year wasn't exactly what she expected. Her small charter school in Santa Clarita, California, closed around graduation, so the event was small and disappointing, and she spent her gap year at home.
Now a senior at Columbia University, her spring is filled with world events of a different kind. Inside her protest camp south of Columbia University's Upper Manhattan campus, she said she couldn't think of a better way to spend the final weeks of her college days than participating in her protests with her fellow classmates.
“Unfortunately, being part of Generation Z means dealing with repeated situations of a world in absolute hostility and chaos.” Mr Ongele spoke while wearing a black face mask and standing in front of a community guidance board in front of the encampment. “We are the generation of school shootings, the generation that has to deal with climate change. We've dealt with the short end of the stick time and time again. I won't say it's expected because at some point in our lives we feel like we need to know normalcy. But it was a lot of work.”
Having a real graduation ceremony meant a lot to Lindsay, 21, who asked to be identified only by her first name to protect her employment opportunities after college. Her graduation from a private high school in Manhattan four years ago “exceeded my expectations,” she said, and now she’s worried she won’t even be able to celebrate her graduation from Columbia University.
“I’m very emotional,” she said as she stood in front of the bleachers set up near Rowe Library in preparation for the graduation ceremony. “Graduating from college is a really big deal.”
She said she hopes graduation ceremonies can go on, at least to some extent, even if it's hard to imagine.
“I don’t know how that will happen.” she said, looking at her camp. “I hope that anyone who wants to protest will give space to those who are graduating and make it about our seniors and nothing else.”
With graduation less than a month away from Cal State Humboldt, campus closures and student protests have brought back a wave of memories for some students.
Jacqueline V. Espinoza, 21, a senior at Humboldt, said the last time she experienced this kind of intersection between personal and global history was around this time four years ago.
“It was a really surreal moment thinking about the class of 2020,” said Espinoza, an English major. She said, “I remember the numerous BLM protests that took place during that time. Now that I'm graduating in 2024, I can definitely see the similarities.”
Dezmond Remington, 20, a Cal State Humboldt graduate, said he was excited to finally graduate, but wanted to do so in a more low-key way.
“I was really looking forward to the last few weeks of being able to have my whole family here and graduate and get on with my life,” he said.
At USC, Mustafa Ali Khan, 21, was looking forward to graduation, especially after transferring to USC after two years of community college. “In these moments, he carries a lot of weight. It’s like the culmination of a lot of hard work you’ve put in.”
He said USC's decision to cancel its major commencement ceremony will be especially painful for families who already had plans to come to campus.
“My mom now says she can’t wait for me to graduate from graduate school,” he said.